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At £34m, it's the most valuable Russian import
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent3 Oct 2008
The most important and valuable Russian painting ever to come to auction goes on show in London today.
Suprematist Composition by Kazimir Malevich has been seen only once in Britain before, when it was at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1959.
It can be viewed at Sotheby's for the next few weeks before the work by the Ukranian-born avant-garde artist, who studied and worked in Moscow, is sold in New York on 3 November by Malevich's heirs. The estimate is understood to be in excess of $60 million (£34 million).
Emmanuel Di-Donna, vice chairman of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art worldwide, said Suprematist Composition was a modern masterpiece.
"It ranks amongst the finest paintings of the 20th century, on a par with the best of modern masters such as Picasso, Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning that have ever come up for sale either at auction or privately," he said. "It's instantly recognisable as Malevich. It's one of those great ground-breaking works that have enormous importance."
The painting has spent the last half century in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. Malevich's heirs fought a 17-year battle to reclaim the work along with others that they argued had been illegally sold to the museum after the artist died in 1935.
He brought many of his most important paintings to Europe in 1927 for his first exhibition in the West. But he was forced to leave them in storage and return to Russia because of a visa problem.
Malevich would never leave Russia again and spent time in prison because the authorities feared the contacts he had made abroad and had condemned abstract art.
Suprematist Composition was painted in 1916, the year Malevich published his Suprematist Manifesto which prioritised "pure feeling" in art over objective representation.
Described as a constellation of geometry and colour, it was first shown in Moscow at the 16th State Exhibition in 1919 - one of the first important exhibitions of Malevich's work and the one which established his reputation.
The work is expected to attract bidding from both the top American collectors and the new band of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
The current record for a Malevich is £11.3 million in 2000 for a much later Suprematist painting. The record for any Russian work of art is £12.4 million for Wassily Kandkinsky's Fugue set in 1990.
